NOTES

Tapoti is a town seventeen miles northwest of Juichin in Kiangsi Province, the main Red base. Tapoti is said to be a colourful place, with high mounds of red clay and green pine woods. Rice paddies and farmhouses with grey tile roofs and white walls add their colours. Willows line the streams. After rain, there are rainbows in the sky with as many colours as the landscape.

‘Fierce battles that year’ probably refers to the fighting in February 1929 in which the Red Army lost heavily but captured hundreds of Nationalist troops and rifles.

The poem repeats one of Mao’s favourite situations — a landscape beautiful in itself, made more attractive by Red Army victory and the presence of Communist soldiers and flags, adding their own colours (including blood) to those of the town and country. —Transcriber, MIA